Missing The Point

Over at Popular Mechanics, Erik Sofge says that NASA misses the point with its new video game. Unfortunately, he misses the point himself, setting up the age-old and false dichotomy between humans and robots:

The game serves as an epitaph for what appears to be NASA’s lost decade. The agency failed to stay on time or on budget throughout the life of the Constellation program, its highest and most expensive priority. But while manned spaceflight foundered, unmanned exploration thrived. The modern-day equivalent of Aldrin and Armstrong are Spirit and Opportunity, robotic vehicles that survived years longer than expected on the surface of Mars. The rovers uncovered signs of water, and paved the way for the discovery of actual Martian ice by other intrepid bots.

The success of the rovers—and the increasingly tepid public response to shuttle launches or to the astonishing fact that there is a space station orbiting the planet—has called into question the relevance of astronauts. Moonbase Alpha, in its own small way, only hurts the case for humans in space. If the game featured an all-bot lunar mining facility, players would be spared the burden of gradually, tediously fixing a life-support system. Critical decisions such as whether to carry a wrench or a welder (apparently, NASA doesn’t plan on producing a moon-worthy toolbox by 2025) could be replaced with, say, a simulation of the powerful, spider-like ATHLETE robot’s perilous navigation of craters on the dark side of the moon. Instead of being given control of the array of awe-inspiring bots currently in NASA’s labs, such as the humanoid Robonaut 2, players can deploy toylike rovers whose arms and integrated welders make the astronauts piloting them even more redundant.

Apparently, he suffers from the exploration delusion. If it’s only about exploration, then yes, robots are more cost effective (though not more generally effective). But when you start to say that robots can do it better, it begs the question of what it is that they’re better at. While they can be good helpmates, they are ultimately useless for allowing humans to experience space first hand, and that’s ultimately the real market for human spaceflight, albeit not government human spaceflight. Robots can make it easier for humans to go but they don’t make them superfluous. He also has bought into the popular perception of the new policy:

Even if it was possible to build an astronaut game that’s both exciting and realistic, why bother? It will be more than a decade before humans even attempt another trip outside of Earth’s orbit. If NASA wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts and engineers, its games should focus on the real winners of the space race—the robots.

No one knows when we’ll go beyond earth orbit again, but a decade is a long time. When I see the kind of progress that SpaceX has made in seven years, I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t private trips at least around the moon, if not landing, by 2020. Of course, the new policy makes that more likely than the previous one did, and the previous policy hadn’t a prayer, or even a plan, to meet President Bush’s original VSE goals. And the notion that government ten-year plans are the key to opening up space is one that should have died with Apollo, which wasn’t at all about opening up space. I’ll also say that if robots are really the “winners of the space race,” we’re all losers.

I’ll be very surprised if there aren’t private trips at least around the moon, if not landing, by 2020.

Have you considered trying to get this up on some futures site? It would be interesting to see how the price fluctuates. Of course, you would have to define “private” carefully to avoid confusion about whether a Soyuz or its launcher is private or not. Some might have problems with Dragon because of the COTS funding, also.

I don’t think there really is any currently, other than that the development of technology to make it affordable could contribute to governmental goals like saving the planet, or (long term) providing a backup. It partly depends on what you think the role of government is. I think that it’s worthwhile to expand the region in which human freedom can thrive, but I certainly don’t think that the current government wants to have anything to do with such a project.

Robots don’t explore, they collect data. People explore, because exploration is a sensory experience. When Google’s web bots show up at my website, are they exploring or data-gathering? It’s the end-user, a meatsack who uses Google’s tools to find my website, who does the actual exploring (and cognitive digestion thereof) of the content at the website.

I’m just not buying the whole ‘robots as explorers’ thing. It just strikes me as anthropomorphisation ad absurdum.

Don’t get me wrong, I think robots are phenomenal tools with broad application. But if there isn’t a robot that can fill the gas tank of my car, why would I expect robots to build me a Moon base, for example?

Well yeah, I can’t disagree. Consider this recent coolant failure on the ISS. The good: they haven’t scrambled the Shuttle to fix it, yet. The bad: the plan is to just replace the part with a spare and put in an order in for a new one to be delivered on the next resupply.

If you’re on the way to Mars, that isn’t going to work. Astronauts on the ISS should be learning how to *fix* that broken coolant system, not just replace it with a spare. Everyone knows this but NASA has no real interest in doing anything about it. The “preparation for exploration” mission for the ISS is just a justification – it’s lip service.

The space probe might not be “exploring” in your sense, but the group that is running the space probe is. After all, they are conducting a “sensory experience” on another planet. Space exploration right there.

But if there isn’t a robot that can fill the gas tank of my car, why would I expect robots to build me a Moon base, for example?

There’s not much value to a robot that can fill your gas tank and you can readily do it yourself (unless you suffer from severe handicaps, which probably would keep you from driving as well). In contrast, it currently is very expensive to send anything to the Moon. Even now, it’s probably significantly cheaper to send up cargo with a few simple teleoperated robots for moving things around and pushing some dirt than to send up some people to do the same tasks. So at the least, setting up equipment and structures for human habitation could be done without requiring an early human presence or human overhead.

Past that, you’ll probably need a much more sophisticated system. That’ll raise the price tag a lot unless there are robots of that sort in common use.

If you’re on the way to Mars, that isn’t going to work. Astronauts on the ISS should be learning how to *fix* that broken coolant system, not just replace it with a spare. Everyone knows this but NASA has no real interest in doing anything about it. The “preparation for exploration” mission for the ISS is just a justification – it’s lip service.

I have to disagree. The ISS simply has too many missions to do that. They can’t afford to expend labor on a problem unless it has a quick fix, which I gather this didn’t.

Even in the absence of developing on site repair, NASA is generating knowledge on failure modes of the stuff in a space station. Down the road when they ready for a more autonomous human presence in space, they can look over this record to see what sort of problems happened and what sort of equipment and training you would need to fix them. In addition, they probably can come up with a decent estimate of how much effort it’d take to fix problems.

The current approach on the ISS is not as useful preparation for a Mars mission as something where the astronauts have to fix everything and generally be self-sufficient for a long period of time, but it does help.

I’ll also say that if robots are really the “winners of the space race,” we’re all losers.

Great closing line.

Ken wrote “But if there isn’t a robot that can fill the gas tank of my car…

That’s a really clever way to get the point across. Of course we could build a robotic filling arm hooked to voice recognition software (multilingual!), and set it to discern the location of tank openings for different vehicles, and adjust to the inevitable poor vehicle alignment, but it’s just so much easier to have a human (you) do it.

With gas stations, the cost for the robot far outweighs the advantage gained, so we don’t do it. I’m hoping the cost of getting humans on-site BEO comes down enough to make that paradigm true for space exploration as well.

Interesting side note: at one point Erik Sofge says “If the game featured an all-bot lunar mining facility, players would be spared the burden of gradually, tediously fixing a life-support system.” There was, in fact, a simulation called Moonbase Released by Wesson International in 1990. Consider it “SimCity on the moon.” 🙂 The operator faced similar challenges in allocating budgets and decisions on what sort of equipment (habitat, power, mining, hydroponics) to invest in, not to mention how many new workers one should import from Earth.

It is an MS-DOS-based game, and by all reports rather problematic to run under Win-XP or Win7, without the use of DosBox. I used to play it occasionally back in the day, and found it somewhat buggy. Pity. It would be nice if someone could pry the source code from Wesson and convert it to an open-source simulator for modern operating systems.

Karl, then what you’re saying is that NASA hasn’t learned anything over the last 10 years? Cause they’ve had problems before and the fix is always just to shove in the new part. There’s no evidence at all that they know how to make a vehicle that could make it to Mars without killing the crew.

I think the ISS should immediately be put on a self sufficient footing. If something breaks, they should try to fix it, right there on the station. If they need some parts or equipment they don’t have they can have that resupplied, but the goal should be to use general equipment and 3d printing technologies to eliminate that resupply. When the ISS can go at least 12 months without resupply you can start talking about a mission of that duration beyond Earth orbit.. otherwise you’re just planning how to kill the crew.

That horse has left the barn. The ISS was built from the beginning assuming ready supply from Earth. Too many parts are ‘black boxes’ simply meant for replacement rather than repair. It’s true that it would have been nice to build it with self-sufficiency in mind from the start, but something tells me that would have cost more money.

A Mars mission would have to be designed with self-sufficiency at the part level (few motors required, reparable, all using the same unit just geared differently, etc). It’s part of the reason why I’ve considered cost estimates for a Mars mission based on ISS development costs to be flawed.

Casey, I have a copy of Moonbase. (I think it’s the Amiga version.) Maybe I am just being paranoid, but I think there is a built-in bias in the game against exploitation of the Moon. Basically, unless you find a deposit of water (which randomly happens in about a third of runs of the game) it is just about impossible to keep the place going. You run out of money and can’t afford to keep the place supplied.

As for the NASA game I have a fair number of objections to it. To get the game in the first place, you have to install Steam – which proceeds to install a background process in the startup as far too many programs do. And when you get the game, it needs some very serious video hardware to run properly. Far more hardware needed than is justified by the game itself.

NASA probably wrote this thing themselves. They ought to have outsourced it; one thing game developers are good at is writing efficient code.

The modern-day equivalent of Aldrin and Armstrong are Spirit and Opportunity

Utter nonsense. The only reason people got somewhat excited over the rovers, in a way they rarely do about HSF recently, is simply because the rovers were actually doing something, going somewhere new, exploring an alien world. When was the last time HSF did that? Not since 1972 by my count.

I remember playing MoonBase when it was ported to the Mac back in the day. I agree with Fletcher inasmuch as I remember that it was nigh impossible to ever find water when you played, and, unless you did, you were doomed to fail miserably. Granted, that’s probably fairly close to the truth, but it could also have been an issue of the fact that it was much more of a business-centered game, and I was so used to SimCity and its exploits that my young brain couldn’t quite wrap itself around the complexities of MoonBase.

Something I haven’t noticed anyone bring up yet: why in the world is NASA making videogames? Is crappy, expensive marketing that pertains to absolutely nothing that they actually do something NASA should be spending my money on? Their target audience for this game is incredibly small, and already enamored with NASA (otherwise they’d skip the ame). Its not like this is a quick spinoff from some useful simulation used for astronaut training; we don’t exactly expect to have astronauts on the moon any time in the near future.

Unless this was put together by some students for free, and NASA said “sure, we’ll let you put our name on it”, I don’t see what possible positive value this has. Aside from advertising that NASA is so bloody backwards they blow our money making crappy videogames for NASA fanboys/girls that also happen to be gamers, who also don’t mind using Steam.

It’s not like NASA’s been having trouble recruiting people to be astronauts.

When I was just a young lad, I thrilled to the Voyager and Viking photos. But we have the basic knowledge now. What we don’t have is the legend–because we sent robots. We don’t celebrate robots (political consultant theories notwithstanding). And without the legend, the story, the tale, to stand before us, sometimes we don’t want to build on what has been done before. this is not to mean that the Voyager and Viking (and Magellan and Galilieo and Mariner and Pioneer and all the rest) missions don’t have drama–they do. It’s just that it is an order of magnitudes difference than if a human mission had been sent. And we lost something because of that, on many to different levels. There is a “Moon Day”. There will never be a “Jupiter Day”–at least not because of the two Voyager probes.

No one ever truly celebrates Columbus bringing back potatoes in and of itself; no one praises annually the knowledge gained from the measuring of the transit of Venus by those of Cook’s First Voyage; and no one really ruminates on the glories that are gained because know now that something called armacolite exists on the Moon. These are all valuable things in and of themselves and worthy of reasons for going in and of themselves–but do not serve to inspire and motivate to the level needed in and of themselves. It is the human element of the voyage that does that, not the scientific knowledge gained. We lose much when we only send robots, and the most significant is the epic tale. And these things matter.

I don’t understand why the creation of legends should be a function of government. Too much of what government does is vanity, consumption of resources and lives for the glorification of the state. This is a bug, not a feature.

I remember playing “Moonbase” and just restarting the game over and over at the beginning until I got a site that had water. There was really no point playing the game unless you found it.

Which, looking back, was probably a very good feature of the game, teaching young gamers that it doesn’t matter how hard you try if the raw materials ain’t there.

That said, there’s no point to going to the Moon to try to mine resources for the Earth. Oxygen, ice, silicon, titanium….there’s nothing on the Moon that we don’t already have here in greater abundance and cheaper to get. Even better, we have a ubiquitous and inexpensive heat sink in the form of the atmosphere and water bodies–a key requirement for any real industrial process that space planners don’t talk about very much.

Having said that…I understand your concern about a future USS “Make Glorious Story for Benefit People of America”. Not what I’m arguing for–at least not explicitly.

Though is harder and more expensive and will take longer to go to places a lot of folks would like to visit right now, with manned spaceflight you will get *other* things besides merely knowledge–and those things will have enormous practical utility, and I say of an order of magnitude beyond whatever robotic things can do.

Now, on another practical level, and this time getting back to “government”–I have no problem with the level of funds going to various robotic programs, since those funds are not of the level that would make a manned space exploitation effort a reality tomorrow if they were reallocated tomorrow–so there is no reason not to fund them. The majority of the technologies used in robotic probes are probably of ultimate dual use in some way, shape, or form, so their really isn’t a problem.

Likewise, robotic supporters need to realize that the hard reality is that if the manned spaceflight budget was entirely killed tomorrow, very little of that money would be kept in the House of NASA. A few billion a year is all that pure science should ever count on–unless it is linked to manned spaceflight. My take at any rate–but I do think it a very accurate reading of the political realities.

Finally, at some point increased use of robotics without a manned effort is like someone telling John Smith that while Virginia is nice, there is a really neat Grand Canyon we need to go look at (since it has been a while since anybody has been there), and so forget this quaint colonization effort…

The relevant dates are–Coronado’s men, 1540; Jamestown, 1607; John Wesley Powell, 1868; various surveys leading to creation of USGS–1870s ). Takeaway– Exploration and Exploitation take time, and at some point exploitation leads to far greater exploration than ever happen if only exploration was undertaken.

“Even better, we have a ubiquitous and inexpensive heat sink in the form of the atmosphere and water bodies–a key requirement for any real industrial process that space planners don’t talk about very much.”

It is quite possible to dump a substantial amount of heat via radiation – if you’re located somewhere airless. Here on Earth, even “radiators” are fundamentally designed around the idea that a fluid will absorb and carry away the waste heat. But on the moon, the floor of a pit just 1m x 1m x 1m is going to be able to dump heat quite well most of the time. And preventing warming while the sun is sufficiently overhead to hit the bottom is a matter of opening a multi-layer parasol.

In addition, a chunk of the chemical plants that come to mind have tangled “integrated heating-cooling” issues where you want -this- spot hot, and -that- spot cool, and this other spot freezing. To the point that the bulk of the complexity of the plant is focused around that single concept – taking “things you want to cool” near “things you want to warm” and trying to reduce the damn utilities costs.

I would be tickled pick if asked to design a chemical plant in a location with daytime highs of 390K, nighttime lows of 100K and no air.

On a spaceship, the goal is really to keep the nearby human occupied area at sane temperatures, and possibly to keep the finicky cryogenic fluids at insane temperatures. At a base, you’d separate these. The cryofluids to be buried as deeply as practical, and the human living quarters not sitting within meters of the industrial process with a 500K optimum temperature.

Even if you’re radiating to 0K, radiative effectiveness is governed by the fourth power of temperature. Which means dumping heat by radiation is ALWAYS going to be more difficult than dumping by convection at low (300-400K) temperatures. Heat rejection is going to be a major problem for any lunar activity, even one sitting at the bottom of a permanently shadowed lunar crater pointing at permanent darkness.

I don’t know why people uncritically accept the notion that robots do exploration — or almost any activity — as well as human beings. It’s purely nuts. And I would have thought what happened at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico recently would have driven that point home quite hard indeed. How long would it have taken to seal up that well if a crew of human roughnecks had been able to go right down to the site, look at it from all angles, push and pull things, use power equipment to do this and that? Weeks, max. Using fragile, stupid and expensive robots with very limited sensory capacities made it take months.

The accomplishments of Spirit and Opportunity and all the rest of the bots are only “remarkable” because they’re being done by machines, and we have very low expectations for them. Who would be impressed if an expedition of human beings to the Red Planet had managed only to walk 7 kilometers in 2 years, knock some chips off of rocks and stuff them into spectrometers, and take a few hundred thousand photos, many of which are badly aimed? Nobody. What S and O did would have been totally trivial for a team of human beings. But such a team would have been far more observant, been able to adapt much more flexibly and usefully to actual conditions on the ground, and make far better use of their time. Who knows what they might have accomlished? Maybe we’d no longer be muttering about the “possibility” of life on Mars, or water ice, et cetera, 40 years after Viking landed — we’d actually know, because human beings on the scene would have figured it out. We’re very good at that kind of thing, adapting to and understanding the unknown.

Robots are certainly much cheaper than human beings, given the very high value we place on not dying by accident. But you get what you pay for. You send a ‘486 CPU to do a man’s job, and you’re going to get far more meager results. The bot argument essentially rests on (1) an assumption that quantity can make up for quality — we can send far more robots out than we can humans, and to farther and weirder places, and this will make up for the far better capabilities of humans we’re missing, and (2) the fact that we’re all still just amazed that robots can do anything at all that mimics what we do, and we get great enjoyment out of watching bots do things — anything at all. A bot could be programmed to stand up and plant an American flag on Mars and wave at the camera and we’d be thrilled. Wow! Cool! It’s almost like it’s alive!

“Which means dumping heat by radiation is ALWAYS going to be more difficult than dumping by convection at low (300-400K) temperatures.”

Unless, of course, someone has stolen all the air. 😀

Yes, and graybody radiation is trickier than blackbody, and the actual background you’re trying to dump heat to is at least 3K, if not closer to 40K, etc.

But “major problem” still seems like an overstatement. Top ten, sure. Space intensive? Likely. Mechanically difficult? Conceptually complex? Not likely. But things will clearly look different. Like a flat plain of aluminum with internal plumbing and a sunshade maybe. And most anything mobile is going to have issues.

Additionally: A fair number of industrial processes are -not- going to be radiating from the tame end.

Tom, if I’m in the middle of desert? Then I’m quite happy I packed my toolbox when I call my mechanic.

I think my argument is pretty simple: they should *try* to fix it up there as a learning exercise in self-sufficiency. They can’t learn by doing if they don’t even try. If they’re not willing to learn then they should stop pretending they’re preparing for a trip to Mars in an ISS sized vehicle cause they aint.

[[[Tom, if I’m in the middle of desert? Then I’m quite happy I packed my toolbox when I call my mechanic.]]]

If you didn’t I hope you packed your portable welder instead. Or do you think you will just glue the broken metal parts together?

I guess you never tried taking the water pump on your car apart. In fact have you ever done major repair work on it at all, like rebuilding an engine? I am assuming not from your attitude towards this question.

Its not like software where you might find a clever coding solution. Metal parts are much tougher to work with. I recommend you do so before casting stones at others.

I think the ISS should immediately be put on a self sufficient footing.

An electric motor is a pretty simple concept but most designs require a specialist to build one along with the machine tools and raw materials (we can assume a supply of wire rather than the need to make wire… long term they need to make the wire as well.)

Colonization will come in phases. Later phases will include more machinists.